Archive for the ‘tips’ tag

If you want to follow a piece of news through Twitter, try searching for the article’s URL instead of its title or a set of keywords. In TweetReach snapshot reports, we can search for a root URL, so even if a link is shrunk into a t.co, bit.ly or other shortener, we’ll pick it up.

Some more tips to get the results you’re looking for:

Exclude the http:// or www. They don’t impact your search and lengthen your search query. And depending on the URL shortener, might not even be included in the link.

Keep queries at about 60 characters or under. If you have a long URL, consider searching for the second half – the unique part – of the URL to save space.

Want to see an example? Say you want to follow this New York Times article Sushi’s New Vanguardand watch how it spreads through Twitter. In your TweetReach search, you can leave out the http:// and www. portions of the URL. Search just for this:

nytimes.com/2013/10/30/dining/sushis-new-vanguard.html

That will result in this snapshot report. Note how it includes tweets that use nyti.ms shortened URLs, among others.

If you’ve got Twitter setup to be able to receive notifications and send tweets and more from your phone, you can also turn off notifications for certain periods of time- such as when you’re sleeping- if you don’t want to be woken up by an errant tweet in the middle of the night.

Under the “Mobile” tab in your left-hand menu, scroll down to find this:

Alternatively if you’re running a campaign, or taking your turn on customer service duty, you can uncheck the box and be able to respond in a timely manner.

If you’re running a contest and using TweetReach to track it, you’ll want to take a look at this post so you don’t miss any of the tweets you want to capture. For best results, we have a few suggestions. Keep your original tweet short (120 characters or less) and unique, and use hashtags and a unique URL to distinguish yourself from other contests (a generic term like “RT for a chance to win an iPad” gets tweeted 40 times a minute).

Now let’s look at specifics, depending on whether you’re measuring results after the fact with a snapshot report or setting up a Tracker to monitor tweets in real-time through your TweetReach Pro subscription.

TweetReach Snapshot Report

There are a few ways to search for contest tweets in a snapshot report. Remember that a snapshot report will look back at up to 1500 recently posted tweets from the past few days, so you can run a snapshot after a contest ends if only ran for a few days and had fewer then 1500 tweets.

1. Don’t search for the entire text of a tweet; search for the first 50-60 characters of your tweet, wrapped in quotation marks. Remember that retweets add characters to the front of your tweet. “jimmyjohn: you so silly Sandwich Place! RT @sandwichartiste: RT if you love meatball subs! #subs4life” is longer than “@sandwichartiste: RT if you love meatball subs! #subs4life”. Make sure that a user adding a note before the text of their retweet won’t push any terms you are searching for beyond the 140 character limit.

2. Use an original hashtag or URL in your contest tweet, and search for all retweets that contain “RT” and your hashtag or URL. (Put exactly RT #subs4life or RT http://bit.ly/12aoGYA in the TweetReach search bar for your snapshot report.)

TweetReach Pro Tracker

If you expect significant participation or want to run your contest for more than one week, set up a Tracker in advance. Trackers can monitor unlimited tweets for unlimited time; you just need to set them up before your tweets start going out. The same rules apply to a Tracker, but you can (and should) set up a Tracker to search for your contest tweet in both ways.

Search for both the first 50 characters of the tweet, but also any identifying URLs or hashtags you’re using. A Tracker can include up to 15 different queries, so you can enter in several different combinations to make sure you’re getting exactly the tweets you’re looking for.

Love seeing Twitter streams on other people’s websites (very handy for finding and following new accounts at a glance!) and wondering how to get your own? Twitter makes it easy for you. Just go to Settings –> Widgets –> Create new.

We’ve talked before about why brands should favorite tweets, but here’s another way to use that little gold star feature on Twitter: whenever you’ve got a second, go check out the favorites from an account you enjoy following that you find really useful. Chances are they’ve favorited some articles and resources they’ve meant to go back to later.

This also gives you a way to find other accounts to follow; just click through on the avatars of insightful tweets you run across (maybe in a new tab so you don’t lose your place if you’re finding a lot of good tweets in someone’s favorites). This is a great trick for building up the most useful Twitter stream possible, no matter your industry or topic of choice.

A quick Twitter Tip that serves as a reminder to periodically check on and purge which apps you’ve authorized on Twitter, and make any necessary changes.

To check, go to your Twitter Settings from the drop down menu you can access by clicking on the gear icon.

By selecting Apps on the menu on the lefthand side of your screen, you’ll see a list of all the apps you’ve authorized to have some degree of access to your Twitter account. Check to see if there are any that look suspicious, or that you’d just like to revoke access to because you no longer use it. You can also check on the level of access any apps have- read only, read and write, etc- and change it if necessary, by revoking access and reinstating it, being careful in the level of access you allow (most apps allow you to check boxes saying they can or cannot post on your behalf, etc).

You might want to set a calendar reminder to periodically check on which apps have been authorized and do a little cleaning.

Setting up Twitter lists can seem like an imposing task, but they’re a great tool to organize a range of things: resources for your industry, thought leaders to learn from, customers to keep track of, industry verticals, comedians for when you need a break– whatever you can dream up.

If you’re just getting started, you might want to check out other users’s public lists. You can subscribe to these (and they’ll show up at the bottom of your lists so other people will know which lists you’re subscribed to) and get an idea of what works for you on a list and what doesn’t. Best of all? You don’t have to be following someone to put them in a list. A lot of thought leaders, for example, would be people who tweet at high volumes and could flood your feed. Keep them to a list and you can learn from them in a way that isn’t overwhelming, then follow the ones who provide the most value to you. (It’s also a great way to keep track of competitors; and yes, you can make a list private, which you might want to do with that one.)

Favoriting tweets doesn’t just have to be something you do on your personal account when you see something funny or interesting that you want to check out later. From a brand account, favoriting can be a good way to say thank you to customers who say nice things to you.

Instead of retweeting a compliment (which can be seen as self-promotional, particularly if you get a lot of compliments and retweet them all) take a moment to thank the person who complimented you, and favorite the tweet. It’s a nice, meaningful gesture to the customer that lets them know there’s a person behind the account who’s touched they took the time out of their day to reach out and say something nice.

We’re only bragging as an example.

Bonus? Favorited tweets are public, so anyone can go to your profile and see what you’ve favorited. It gives a pretty good impression of what you’re all about, and in this case a page with compliments in it might persuade an undecided potential customer that they should try you out.

About TweetReach

TweetReach is brought to you by Union Metrics. We focus on delivering powerful social analytics that enable marketers to measure and improve their social media campaigns. We provide analytics across Twitter, Instagram and Tumblr.

Here on our TweetReach blog, we share our favorite Twitter tactics and strategies, as well as company announcements and events.